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Grrrrr

John Gallas

Cover Picture of Grrrrr
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
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  • What Looby and Delaney know is light
    is just a one of God's Own moods and that
    is easily learned. Come let us pay our each
    convivial ransom somewhere welcome-warm
    and talk about the sun. I saw a storm
    riding on its moon-washed clouds reach
    the steeple-clock: but there was time. I sat
    and watched the hail miss past me, and the night.
     

    from `Turbulent Tipp: Goodfridaynight'

               
    Grrrrr is the sound of our lives winding themselves up; the sound of our mechanisms continuing the search for Something Wonderful, wherever it may be. It is a weird and comic volume with, at its heart, a huge poem called `Redness' (a kind of antipodean Faust), and two Turkish tales of lust, treachery, violence, treachery, murder, treachery and a stolen minaret.

    The remaining twelve poems feature Sir Richard Burton discovering what is not new, camels; Tipperary at Easter; Samarkand; a tourist enjoying significance in the wrong place; the necessity of being mad; T.E.Lawrence; insomnia; the dead Fellini; a shoe shop arson; and the diary of a winter in Diyarbakir, a true and personal account.

    These poems are narratives that redefine narrative: from Tanganyika to Tillo, from Ravenna to Rotorua, by bicycle and by camel, the journey continues, to somewhere surely better, if only we could recognise it.
    John Gallas was born in New Zealand in 1950. He came to England in the 1970s to study Old Icelandic at Oxford and has since lived and worked in York, Liverpool, Upholland, Little Ness, Rothwell, Bursa, Leicester, Diyarbakir, Coalville and Markfield, as a bottlewasher, archaeologist, and teacher. His books are published ... read more
    Praise for John Gallas 'John Gallas is not merely a lyric master, but a master of meaning... The Extasie is a collection that I feel I will be coming back to frequently, not just to recapture the enjoyment I had when first reading it, but also to fully bathe in the complex understanding of love in all its forms, rendered so skilfully in poems that reward a second reading with subtle epiphanies.'

    Ed Bedford, Coffee Time Reviews

    'This is a book for contemplative reading to enjoy all its richness and subtleties. Quietly thought provoking and intelligent, these are poems that celebrate the messiness of life.'

    - Mary Mulholland, The Alchemy Spoon
     'An enticing and timely collection of translations.'
    - The Guardian


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